I come from faraway Maryland to pursue my Masters in CS. My undergrad is in math from UMBC (University of Maryland – Baltimore County). I worked at the MITRE Corporation for three years after college, working test and evaluation for national security-related research projects, primarily related to crowd-sourced anticipatory intelligence: using “wisdom of the crowds” to assign probabilistic estimates to possible global events (e.g. 0.01% chance that Slovakia will invade North Dakota in the next ten years). I have experience with prediction markets, aggregating human judgements, event coding, and human factors/usability. In the course of my work I became fluent in R, Python and Stata. I can do some limited JavaScript and HTML…in a crisis.
I’m interested in topics related to digital authoritarianism and networked protests; basically, how authoritarian governments harness technology to stifle dissent and otherwise exert control over their people (and/or other nations’ people, as in “hacked” elections), and how people use the technology available to them to organize against their oppressors. But I don’t have a good idea yet of how to narrow that down to a topic that can be studied within the confines of a semester. Maybe we could zero in on one specific way that state actors, like law enforcement, work with social media—something like police responses to suicide threats via Facebook, which got some coverage recently (NY Times (Links to an external site.)). Other CSCW-related interests include:
- What makes people trust (or not trust) the judgements of machines
- How small changes in UI elicit better human judgements
- How disinformation propagates through social media
- How data are collected and/or inferred through social media during humanitarian crises